Kudos to you folks for putting escaping gridlock ahead of personal privacy.
November 11, 2005
Enlisting Cellphone Signals to Fight Road Gridlock By MATT RICHTEL
Some states prohibit drivers from talking on hand-held cellphones lest they become distracted, slow down traffic, or worse, cause an accident. Others are finding that cellphones and driving may not be so bad together.
Several state transportation agencies, including those in Maryland and Virginia, are starting to test technology that allows them to monitor traffic by tracking cellphone signals and mapping them against road grids.
The technology underlines how readily cellphones can become tracking devices for private companies, law enforcement and government agencies - a development that deeply troubles privacy advocates.
These new traffic systems can monitor several hundred thousand cellphones at once. The phones need only be turned on, not necessarily be in use. And advanced software now makes it possible to discern whether a signal is coming from, say, a moving car or a pedestrian.
State officials say that the systems will monitor large clusters of phones, not individual ones, and that the benefits could be substantial. By providing a constantly updated picture of traffic flow across thousands of miles of highways, they maintain, cellphone tracking can help transportation agencies spot congestion and divert drivers with radio alerts or updated electronic road signs.
Next month, Maryland, with the help of the University of Baltimore, plans to begin tests for a cellular tracking system in the Baltimore area. Virginia also plans to test a system around the Norfolk beltway. Missouri says it is about to sign a deal that will allow it to monitor traffic movements over 5,500 square miles of state roadways. Similar mapping technology is in use in London, Tel Aviv and Antwerp, Belgium.
"The potential is incredible," said Phil Tarnoff, director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Maryland. He said the monitoring technology could possibly help reduce congestion in some areas by 50 percent.
But he and others involved in the emerging technology said there were critical hurdles. Chief among them, Mr. Tarnoff said, is getting the cellular carriers, which have been distracted with mergers and customer service problems, to collect and share the cellphone data.
The carriers already collect an enormous amount of data; they can tell, for example, whether a cellphone user is roaming out of their network. But separating the data to show the speed at which cellphones are being passed from one cell tower to another is still a challenge.
To get the data, the monitoring companies have to reach agreements with cellular carriers - presumably, they would pay a cut of their revenue to the providers. But whether they can be profitable or make being involved worth the while of providers is an open question.
(If the companies are able to sell traffic-monitoring services to drivers, who could get access to the information on mobile phones or car navigation systems, revenue could be high. A number of companies already provide traffic data to cellphones and navigation systems, though the data is taken from other sources, like road sensors.)
Indeed, Cingular, which provides the data for the test in Baltimore, plans to stop making data available for traffic monitoring, according to a person briefed on the company's plans. The person said Cingular was busy working on other projects and did not have the time and resources to devote to the efforts. Verizon Wireless, is considering providing this kind of data, according to a person briefed on that company's plans.
But privacy advocates say that traffic monitoring could be the beginning of government use of cellphones to track someone's movements. Even if the tracking is done anonymously and in clusters, they say, it could allow federal and state officials to track where people are headed en masse - to know, for instance, where protesters are gathering.
"This enables the government to have a much easier time of knowing what private people are up to without any sort of process or consent," said Lee Tien, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group.
Companies offering the technology like AirSage and IntelliOne Technologies, both based in Atlanta, or ITIS Holdings, a British company, say they have neither the ability nor the interest to track individuals. Rather, they say the cellular carriers provide them with a stream of raw data that has no personal identification markers.
Any cellphone that is turned on constantly interacts with cellular towers, which are placed every few hundred feet in a metropolitan area or every half-mile or so in a rural area. The monitoring software instantly analyzes those movements.
ITIS, which has been in the business for several years, for example, receives feeds of cellphone signals around the clock from Vodafone and 02, two of Britain's largest mobile phone operators.
The ITIS system, which can receive several hundred thousand signals at once, uses complex computer algorithms to tell whether a signal is coming from a car, a bicycle or someone sitting still. The speed and flow of a cellphone's movement is typically consistent with whether it is being carried on a bike, a car or by a pedestrian, the company said.
The analysis takes seconds, said Stuart Marks, chief executive of ITIS. The information is provided to government transportation agencies or it can be bought by consumers. Mr. Marks said that in London people call in for up-to-date traffic conditions, paying around $1 a minute.
These systems, state traffic administrators say, can notably improve traffic surveillance, and reduce costs by replacing outdated systems using video cameras and sensors embedded in roadways, which cover only limited spots.
"It's a quantum leap from where we are now," said Jeff Briggs, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Transportation, which he said is near an agreement with Delcan.net, a partner of ITIS, based in Markham, Ontario, to monitor state roadways using cellphone data.
Mr. Briggs said the system would let officials warn people of congestion moments after it arose, either through electronic message boards on the roads or over the Internet. "We're harnessing technology that already is being used and data that is already available," he said.
The transportation center at the University of Maryland plans to test a system recently installed around Baltimore that uses technology created by Delcan. The center will compare data on car speeds collected manually with the results delivered by the cell system.
State and federal agencies already spend $750 million a year on traffic monitoring with sensors, signal meters and other technology, Mr. Tarnoff of the Maryland center said. He noted, for example, that it now cost $1,000 to $20,000 to set up sensors or overhead radar detectors that measure traffic patterns for only 100 feet.
But it is not yet clear how much a cellphone monitoring system will cost, said Connie Sorrell, chief of systems operations for the Virginia Department of Transportation. Starting in mid-November, the state, working with the University of Virginia, plans to test a system that uses data provided by Sprint and compiled by AirSage. AirSage also signed a deal in July to provide such technology to the Georgia Department of Transportation, which it intends to begin using early in 2006.
Cy Smith, AirSage's chief executive, said he understood that some people were concerned about privacy, but he stressed that his company did not receive information from cellphone carriers that would allow it to pinpoint the location of an individual. "No person's individual information gets out of that person's cellphone network," he said, then adding, "Nobody gets a speeding ticket."
NY Times
